Mornings Are Hard

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Good Morning, Folks. This is going to be one of my rare unsyndicated posts, where I just talk to the folks who read me every day. This is Tuesday of the down week between my second and third rounds of chemotherapy, and I am well into the recovery mode. Yesterday I had my first round of iron infusions, and that seems to have helped quite a bit in general. When I finished with the infusion, it legitimately felt like I was waking up, and I had way more energy than I have had since I started chemo. This morning, unfortunately, things were back to being really rough, and I think mornings are just going to be that way as I recover. I had a lot of issues with nausea and indigestion last night, and as a result, I did not sleep terribly well, so it is hard for me to subtract what I am struggling with because of lack of sleep and what is struggle due to the treatments. Last round, I did not really start to feel like myself again until Friday of the down week, so I am curious if that happens again.

The thing that worries me the most is that the doctors have talked about how Folfox is additive in the severity of the symptoms with the number of rounds that you have. The first round was honestly a cakewalk, apart from the whole blood pressure issues that I was dealing with. This round… the challenges have all increased from more days with nausea, to the whole weird-assed cold reaction lasting longer, to feeling like I just have no stamina when it comes to doing anything. I am trying my best to continue to function, and I am hoping I have a few good days at the end of the week to get some stuff done around the house. For the moment, doing my job and making sure both myself and the cats are fed is pretty much the maximum load that I can seemingly handle. Even playing games feels way more taxing than it should, and I have spent more time just catching up on shows than pretty much anything else.

I am not complaining as a call for help, because I have plenty of resources that I can draw upon. I am just a deeply stubborn human being and really would prefer to do things on my own if at all possible. However, as we roll into round three, I am starting to doubt if that is going to be possible, especially if there is a continued escalation of symptoms, and I have six more rounds of this to go. I am going in for lab work on Friday, and I am really curious to see if the iron infusion has made any sort of lasting change to how low my red blood cell count was. I would post a picture of what the infusion looks like, but it is a wee bit too close to blood, and I do not want to make anyone squeamish. It was really weird because it sort of felt like I was bleeding in the wrong direction while taking it. I still have way more color than I did before yesterday, thanks to the infusion, but I think the burst of energy that I had immediately following it was all too temporary.

All I really want now is a nap, so I might take one over my lunch break. I wish sleep came easier, but there always seems to be something getting in the way, and my old trick of Benadryl and Magnesium Glycinate does not seem to actually be working. One of the things that I swore when I started this process is that I would be honest with my readers about how it is going. This morning’s blog post is mostly just explaining where we are at. I am doing okay, I will be just fine, I will make my way through this… but it is going to be a much larger challenge than I originally thought it was going to be.

Bad At Anniversaries

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Good Morning Folks. I am bad at realizing what time of the year it is… and that my blog and podcast anniversaries are approaching. As a result, last Friday, aka April 17th, was the 17th anniversary of Tales of the Aggronaut. The left side of the above image is one of the earliest revisions of the site as saved by the Wayback Machine. Then, of course, on the right side, you have what the site looks like now. I’ve not made any really significant revisions to the look and feel of the site in a very long time, other than to shim in more artwork from Ammo as I commission something else. There was a point where I cared about readership, but honestly, at this point, I view this blog as a sort of outsider art project. You either care about me and what I have to say, or you don’t, and I can’t be much bothered to tailor my writing to follow whatever trends might be happening. Many of you have been with me through the death of animals, the loss of my spouse of thirty years, and now, as I am dealing with cancer. I’ve tried to be as honest as I can be with my thoughts and feelings as I went through all of it. Without really intending to, I somehow built a community of folks who care about me, and I appreciate that so much when things get low.

I also completely forgot to talk about the Anniversary of AggroCha,t the podcast that I started in 2014. This past weekend, we recorded episode 656, and started this nonsense back on April 13th of 2014. Listening to the early episodes makes me cringe super hard, but I think it is more about how different human beings many of us were back then. A lot of stuff had not happened that shook the core of both our gaming roots and, honestly, American civilization, and it shows. Folks have come and gone from the roster, but the original core of Me, Ash, and Kodra has remained pretty rock solid through all of it. It’s only gotten better as we added everyone that represents our current core of Ace, Ammo, Ashgar, Kodra, Tam, and Thalen. At this point, it is way more about hanging out together at a fixed time and talking about discussions that we don’t necessarily make time for at other moments than anything else. For both the blog and the podcast, they are not money-making ventures, nor have I ever wanted them to be. However, I am still pretty proud of us sticking with this for as long as we have.

In gaming terms this weekend, I wrapped up my 36th challenge out of 40 and think that I am going to wind down Path of Exile for the moment. Mirage League was a lot of fun, but I have more or less accomplished everything that I care to accomplish. At this point, I would only be moving forward with the acquisition of currency for the sake of acquiring currency. We should be getting news on the Path of Exile II league pretty soon, and next Tuesday is the drop for the Diablo IV Lord of Hatred expansion. While I have not fallen in love with Diablo IV in the same way as I did Diablo III, it should still be fun to poke around and play with the new Warlock class a bit. I think I have also reached a point where I have wound down my interest in Last Epoch as well. Those seasons are great for a week or two, but I quickly run out of things that I actually care to do, at least much faster than I do in a Path of Exile league. All of the ARPGs are in a pretty great state, and they all become somewhat interchangible for my joy at any given moment.

On a complete whim, over the weekend, I picked up Crimson Desert and started playing that. I am honestly not sure what I think of this game yet. Combat is mostly pretty fun, but movement and the pace of the game in general are a bit on the slow end. The world is gorgeous, and there is a lot of interesting stuff going on. I was not sure what sort of game to really consider this, but after playing, I think it is more akin to something like Dragon’s Dogma. If I had my druthers, it would perform exactly like The Witcher 3, but I do not get what I want most of the time. I am not entirely certain how much I am going to play it, because I have already had moments where the slow pace was a bit too plodding for me. I was also immediately annoyed when Steam popped up the “you should play this with a controller” message, but the game itself performs perfectly fine with a mouse and keyboard. There is a rumor that we are just about to get another expansion for The Witcher 3, and if that happens, it means I am going to drop whatever I am doing and play that.

I have a backlog of a lot of recent titles that I really need to get around to playing. Greedfall: The Dying World moved out of early access to its final release version in March, and as a result, I am now interested in playing that. Greedfall was a deeply imperfect game, but it was doing a lot of things that I really liked. I am also somewhat interested in diving into Star Wars Outlaws and the next part of the Final Fantasy VII reimaginging trilogy. There is also Death Stranding 2, which might honestly be the right sort of game for the weird time that I am going through. I played the first one at the height of COVID isolation, and as a result, it felt deeply poignant. Since I am similarly greatly limiting my exposure to other human beings due to the chemotherapy wrecking my immune system, it might produce similar results. I have more games than I can ever play. If I am being perfectly honest, I just have to figure out something that lands right and brings me joy since I have wound down my old reliable partner in Path of Exile.

Anyways… I have been writing this post for several hours now. I need getting distracted by either work or chemo brain, and figure I should wrap things up. What are you playing right now that is bringing you joy? Drop me a line and let me know.

AggroChat #565 – Non-Euclidean Horses

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Featuring: Ace, Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, and Tamrielo

Hey Folks! I did not realize this until pulling together the post this morning, but apparently, last Monday was the 12th anniversary of our podcast, and last Friday was the 17th anniversary of the Tales of the Aggronaut blog. We have, in fact, been doing this for a while, it seems. Tonight, we start off the show staring into the black hole of equine abominations that is Horsey Game. From there, we talk a bit about the madness that is the challenge mode of Peglin brought by Act 4. After listening to Tamrielo talk about his Mage build in Last Epoch, Belghast was inspired to roll his own Fire Aura build, and we talk a bit about the weaknesses of the Spellblade in general when it comes to survival. Tam shares his initial thoughts on House of Hikmah, a beautiful artistic journey into the Islamic Golden Age. Finally, we talk a bit about the progress Kodra has made with his wolf pack build in Path of Exile, and Bel shares some thoughts about the amazing new overlay tool for the game called Scalpel.

Topics Discussed:

  • Horsey Game
  • Peglin Act 4
  • Last Epoch and Fire Aura
  • House of Hikmah
  • Path of Exile
    • Wolf Pack Build
    • Scalpel Overlay

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Challenge Totem Upgraded

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Good Morning, Friends. I am alive and have mostly survived another round of chemotherapy. The good news… my blood pressure has mostly stayed stable during this round after various tweaks to meds. The bad news… I still feel like I am falling apart and everything is a struggle. I guess when you poison your body purposefully with a tiny lemon of evil… There are consequences. I feel better than I did last Friday, but I had hoped the low blood pressure was the majority of what was making me feel like ass at that point. It was at least SOME of it… But I still very much feel like I am operating on maybe a quarter of the energy I would normally have. The cold reaction thing seems to have mostly faded, but I am dealing with sandpaper fingers and a persistent jaw pain, so that is fun and exciting. Cancer is awful, friends, so I highly suggest that you get your colonoscopy early so that, hopefully, if you do have issues, you can take the surgery-only path and not have to go down this hellscape that I am presently puttering along.

In better news, last night I hung out on voice with the Thursday night crew and played some Path of Exile, while they queued for FFXIV roulettes. I managed to push through the last few challenges required to hit 34/40 and get the upgraded totem pole shown in that first screenshot. Technically, I am probably going to keep going for a bit and see how many of the others I can knock out. Not necessarily because I have a deep burning desire for more challenges, but Path of Exile is a comfortable game for me to play and does not require much in the way of thought. There was a little Grids.fun thing that was cycling through the AggroChat crew, and I legitimately put Path of Exile as my “turn my brain off” game. I committed some minor violence by naming Hollow Knight as overrated… but really it is more that Symphony of the Night does everything Hollow Knight does, but does so in a way I enjoy more personally. I do think, though, that Mass Effect Andromeda does not deserve most of the hate that it got, and was a perfectly cromulent gaming experience.

I have been playing some really juicy Legion content and having a lot of fun with it. This is still one of my favorite things about Path of Exile, how you can go so deep on a single mechanic to the exclusion of pretty much everything else… and still have stupid amounts of fun. At some point, I will run a bunch of Legion 5-Ways to burn through the massive stockpile of emblems that I have. I should snag Kodra so he can get credit for them, since I believe one of the challenges required me to run some as well. Honestly, the more people you have in a Legion 5-Wa,y the faster you should, in theory, be able to push through the rounds and the more content you can farm. These can be extremely rippy because I am doing dumb things to force at minimum 150% quantity, because it was required for some of the challenges. Now that I have dinged level 100 though… I don’t really care about the difficulty level since I can no longer lose progress.

Right now, there are two Challenges that seem pretty doable. The first is Vaulted Valuables, which just requires me to run a bunch of Astrolabes and get gems as rewards. I can run the cheapest Astrolabe, which I think is Templar, and push forward with this one just by running random maps. Tremendous Tempests should also be pretty easy to knock out since I am doing the dumb thing to force 150% quant, and just need to run one more map to get it. Tyrannical Tiers is a bit of a stretch goal that I am not sure I will actually make, because if I understand this challenge correctly, I need to run 2667 more “tiers” of maps…. and with the highest option being t16s… that would be 167 more maps. I think I will get there eventually, but it isn’t something that I am going to super focus on. I have PLENTY of maps to run, mind you… but also that one is just a big ole grind that you eventually arrive at and not something I can necessarily sprint towards.

At some point, though, I am likely going to swap back over to Last Epoch and continue my progress on the spellblade righteous fire style character I have been playing. I had to take this specific screenshot this morning, mostly just to show off the sloth backpack and how much I love it. Path of Exile requires less thought from me, so it has been winning for my time. However, I am still super curious to see what the final endgame version of this build can look like. Raxx also released a video this morning with a bunch of wildly overpowered builds that might be worth checking out. I also think we are probably going to get some news from Path of Exile II soon, which will be interesting. April 28th is also when the Diablo IV expansion drops, and I will probably check it out at some point. If I can get to a point where I have more mental fortitude, I might dip into either Pragmata or Greedfall: The Dying World, because I want to experience the story in both of those games.

I am hoping as I go into this weekend, my general health and energy levels improve. I hate feeling so useless, and that everything that I do wears me out. This morning, I had to stop and take multiple breaks while doing things. I got up and showered… and then had to sit down and rest before getting dressed. Then rest again before feeding the cats, and rest again before fixing myself food and heading upstairs. I hate everything about this. Never before have I felt so betrayed by my own body. I knew this would be hard, but I am not sure I was prepared for just how hard it would end up being.